LOVECRAFTIAN THEMESIN BERGIER'S LATER WORK

Jason Colavito2012

In an earlier article, I discussed how Lovecraft governed New Age writer Jacques Bergier’s investigations into the ancient astronaut theory for Morning of the Magicians (1960), the most influential ancient astronaut text ever written (Erich von Daniken, Robert Charroux, and David Childress cribbed shamelessly from it). Some critics, however, do not believe that Lovecraft played a role in Bergier's development of the ancient astronaut theory in 1960. In light of the questions surrounding Lovecraft's influence on Bergier, it's relevant to review Bergier on Lovecraft from Extraterrestrial Visitations from Prehistoric Times to the Present (1970; English trans. 1973), a deeply weird book, perhaps the strangest ancient astronaut book I’ve ever read.

The unnamed translator of the book, whoever he or she was, clearly had no real understanding of the material being translated, making an already obscure text that much more bizarre. Thus, in the first excerpted passages, the name of Lovecraft’s Old Ones is a bit butchered.

“Perhaps the [alien] Intelligences will be forced to wipe out our species […] In any case, the Intelligences seem far removed from H. P. Lovecraft’s Great Old Men, who created life on the earth by mistake or as a joke.” (referencing At the Mountains of Madness)

“[A lost] civilization could have been in […] the extreme south: Antarctica. The ghosts of H. P. Lovecraft and Erle Cox [...] will rejoice when the traces of an advanced civilization in the Antarctic are discovered. It will be one more case of clairvoyance by inspired writers.” (referencing At the Mountains of Madness and Erle Cox's 1919 novel Out of the Silence, about the buried remains of a lost civilization)

“…there once existed a city in the desert, El Yafri, built of enormous cyclopean blocks […] and the city should not be confused with Irem, H. P. Lovecraft’s doomed city…” (referencing “The Nameless City,” but unaware that Irem, or Iram, is from the Quran 89:6-14)

“This book is as much a factual accounting as possible. However, among its readers there will certainly be some science-fiction fans who would like to know what the connection is between the mysteries we have described in this chapter and the myths created by H. P. Lovecraft [...] Much of [Lovecraft's work] relates so directly to the mysteries we have just described that there are still people who go to the Biblioteque Nationale or to the British Museum and ask for the Necronomicon! [...] It is not impossible that at least a part of Lovecraft's myth may be verified when the Empty Quarter is opened to exploration.” (referencing “The Nameless City”)

Throughout, Bergier makes plain his debt to science fiction in general and H. P. Lovecraft in particular for inspiring his investigations into prehistory; even where unnecessary, Bergier emphasizes parallels between Lovecraft and the ancient mysteries he relates.

Extraterrestrial Visitations is a deeply European book, beginning with the author’s insistence that he held an “exclusively rationalist position” even as he then proceeds to pile speculation upon speculation, often without any factual support, in the name of inductive reasoning. He assumes the reader is already familiar with the mysteries he discusses, leaving out conventional references, background information, and anything more than allusions to Victorian newspaper clippings and Fortean speculation. As a result, the text is frequently obscure, understandable only with a deep familiarity with the ancient mystery genre—and with Lovecraft.

Bergier devotes a chapter to the infamous case of Dr. Gurlt’s cube, which he describes as being a 60 million year old perfect cube made of iron, with two opposite faces slightly curved. It had been found in a mine in Austria in 1885, and Bergier made three false claims about it: first, that it is perfect in form; second, it is an extraterrestrial recording device meant to transmit information about earth to outer space; and third, that a conspiracy is responsible for having made the object “disappear” from the Salzburg Museum so scholars like Bergier could never confirm its extraterrestrial origins.

Weirdly for someone writing in 1970, Bergier was completely unaware the object was analyzed in Vienna in 1967 when he wrote of how badly he wanted modern science to examine it. It is in all probability, as Dr. Gurlt suggested in 1886, a lump of meteoric iron. As the image at right shows, it is not a cube in any recognizable sense, much less a device of perfect machine manufacture, what he called “data collectors of the same type as magnetic bands, but much more highly perfected.”

Furthermore, Peter Kolosimo argued that it could not have disappeared from the Salzburg Museum in Austria because it’s actually in the Salisbury Museum, in Britain. (After consulting his original Italian text, I’m not so sure this isn’t Kolosimo’s translation error for Salzburg—not least because the name of the British museum is the “Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum,” though it does have a fine collection of geological specimens. I also don’t see how the cube would have traveled from Britain to Vienna and back in 1967 without any record.)

The Gurlt "Cube" in a Victorian engraving.

Anyway, I don’t want to waste too much time on the facts, since they speak for themselves. What interests me is the way Bergier’s discussion of Dr. Gurlt's cube echoes Lovecraft. The “cube” Bergier persists—against evidence—as viewing as an extraterrestrial device of perfect geometry, which he claims must have been a recording device meant to take note of “everything that has taken place on our planet in the past ten million years.”

“Their owners can no doubt retrieve them at great distance by means of a magnetometer; for the objects, when they receive a certain signal, must be able to indicate their exact position through an answering signal transmitted by magnetic resonance. […] What is to be hoped is that the next angled object discovered will be carefully examined, especially with a mind to extracting its signals.”

This weird theory—unique to Bergier, so far as I know—is, to me, quite closely modeled on Lovecraft’s Shining Trapezohedron from “The Haunter of the Dark” (1935). The Trapezohedron is, like Bergier’s imaginary version of Gurlt’s cube, a “crazily angled stone” of extraterrestrial manufacture that sends and receives signals to other intelligences across the cosmos, “a window on all time and space.” It is also a relic of prehuman times (Triassic, though, rather than Paleogene):

It was then, in the gathering twilight, that he thought he saw a faint trace of luminosity in the crazily angled stone. He had tried to look away from it, but some obscure compulsion drew his eyes back. Was there a subtle phosphorescence of radio-activity about the thing? What was it that the dead man’s notes had said concerning a Shining Trapezohedron? [...] Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window on all time and space, and tracing its history from the days it was fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought it to earth. It was treasured and placed in its curious box by the crinoid things of Antarctica, salvaged from their ruins by the serpent-men of Valusia, and peered at aeons later in Lemuria by the first human beings. It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and sank with Atlantis before a Minoan fisher meshed it in his net and sold it to swarthy merchants from nighted Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-Ka built around it a temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which caused his name to be stricken from all monuments and records.

Based on these close similarities, I would suggest that Bergier’s alternative explanation for Gurlt’s cube is dependent upon Lovecraft’s Trapezohedron. The most telling point is the last sentence of Bergier’s that I quoted above. Despite spending his chapter discussing objects shaped like cubes, spheres, and cylinders, he refers to them collectively as “angled object[s].” This tells me that he had as his model the “crazily angled” Trapezohedron, and not the regular geometric forms of the “real” alien communication devices he purports to discuss.

Note: This article is an expanded and adapted version of a post that first ran on my blog.